Cranky About School Choice in Florida

The Baseball Crank notes a depressing opinion from the Supreme Court of Florida, which decided that school choice programs violate the state constitution. I'm glad to see I can still count on the Supreme Court of Florida to provide extra creativity in constitutional interpretation. I'll leave the deconstruction of the legal opinion to Crank. But Crank also nails the point home for school choice as a good policy...

The majority acts as if just saying that the public schools are uniform and high-quality will make it so. To the contrary, if all of the students in failing schools abandoned them, leaving only the functioning schools afloat, that would create a school system that was genuinely both high-quality and uniform (as the present system is not, and - in the real world - probably never will be).

In the real world, there are public schools that don't perform up to standards, there are people who want their kids to go to a public school, and there are people who do not want their kids to go to a public school. The state can't get out of its constitutional duty to try to fix those schools for those who prefer to remain, but it blinkers reality to ignore the fact that substandard schools have long been with us, and it is truly heartless to require the customers of substandard schools to wait without hope of escape while the decades-long unfulfilled promises of help on the way proceed.

It's a shame that Democrats who are in the vice-grip of the NEA's contributions don't understand that this is an issue that affects the poor the most. Rich people, and even the middle class, will move to better school districts or enroll their kids in private schools, leaving the poor kids in bad schools. We've tried increasing funding for decades, and the results don't follow. Yet charter schools, which provide a limited amount of choice, are a pretty solid success story. Despite all this, choice programs get blasted as some sort of right-wing plan to destory public education, when the system is doing a pretty good job of destroying itself. The NEA loves to mock No Child Left Behind, but their alternative seems to be to Leave All Children Behind, or at least the poor ones whose parents can't move them out of their underperforming public school.